Horst Ludwig Störmer | |
---|---|
Horst Ludwig Störmer
|
|
Born |
Frankfurt, Germany |
April 6, 1949
Nationality | United States |
Fields | Physics |
Institutions | Bell Labs |
Alma mater | Goethe University Frankfurt |
Known for | Fractional quantum Hall effect |
Notable awards |
Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize (1984) Nobel Prize in Physics (1998) The Benjamin Franklin Medal (1998) |
Horst Ludwig Störmer (born April 6, 1949) is a German-born American physicist, Nobel laureate and emeritus professor at Columbia University. He was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Daniel Tsui and Robert Laughlin "for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations" (the fractional quantum Hall effect). He and Tsui were working at Bell Labs at the time of the experiment cited by the Nobel committee.
Störmer was born in Frankfurt am Main, and grew up in the nearby town of Sprendlingen. He studied physics at the J.W. Goethe-Universität at Frankfurt am Main, qualifying for his Diploma in the laboratory of Prof. Werner Martienssen. Here he was supervised by Prof. Eckhardt Hoenig, and worked alongside another future Nobel laureate, Gerd Binnig.
Störmer moved to France to carry out his PhD research in Grenoble, working in a high-magnetic field laboratory which was run jointly between the French CNRS and the German Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research. Störmer's academic advisory was Prof. Hans-Joachim Queisser, and he was awarded a PhD by the University of Stuttgart in 1977 for his thesis on investigations of electron hole droplets subject to high magnetic fields. He also met his wife, Dominique Parchet, while working in Grenoble.
After receiving his PhD, Störmer moved to the USA to work at Bell Labs, where he carried out the research that led to his Nobel prize. After working at Bell Labs for 20 years, he became the I.I. Rabi professor of physics and applied physics at Columbia University in New York City, and is now an emeritus professor.